I definitely want to see an update when the oscilloscope option is made available!!

Seems like the software GUI is made in Java. Nice idea, makes the GUI portable easily :)

Why is it required that all *nix user interfaces look like raw sewage?

If anyone has experience with SUMP, I’d love to hear feedback — the hardware looks good, but the software is important.

I. Want. I wonder if my skills are up to soldering the whole thing by hand.

Can’t wait for the oscilloscope!

The order is a fully assembled board, right?

Go back to instructables, Richard Nibbler.

I’ll probably be preordering one of these soon. :)

Looks great for the price. Unfortunate that this device and the Bus Pirate seem to not have proper mounting holes in the PCB, though. Would be nice to make an enclosure for a more permanent benchtop environment, but it doesn’t seem plausible. I hope the open source nature of this project encourages a better user interface. There’s really no excuse for a UI to not fit an 800×600 pixel display. The window isn’t even resizable?

i doubt i would need an analyzer for anything on instructables but thanks

RedKlipz, If you take the time to read the article, there’s a pre-compiled binary version of the java application for Windows (only). Java was used to easily allow cross-platform compatibility.

You can get cheap clips at dealextreme.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.7218

The lead time sucks, but they’re very inexpensive.

This looks nice. I would love to see some videos with some captures.

Also about the window size issue: You can drag any part of any window with the mouse by holding down “Alt” in X11 (works on all Unix-like systems).

The other thing worth noting is the gadget it’s connected to – Ian’s ‘USB Infrared Toy’. It’s also up on Seedstudio as a preorder and looks like a great kit for investigating IR controls with little effort.

I don’t know which to buy first !

You guys need to work ALOT more on your “demo” skills. The video was 4:51 and showed (or should I say “demo’d”) your product working for about 6 seconds.

No one cares about the CLI install. I’m assuming the files come with a readme or install file?

How about a video of your board actually doing something?

Drone:
The need for cross-platform compatibility as an excuse for writing the client in Java is a poor one, in my opinion.

I’m considering writing a cross-platform client in C++ for this device; it’s awesome hardware and definitely worth it! Is the communications protocol documented anywhere besides the Java src?

And to think i was going to dish $150 for salae.

Really starting to like DangerousPrototypes stuff.

Fore low bandwidth debugging and reversing you can’t beat 50 bucks. I like the orange PCB mask.

I can see this has a lot of potential for reversing stuff, and hardware peeps like me will find Java a lot easier to fiddle with than C++

Once the oscilloscope bit arrives I can see me casing the two together and using the combination quite a bit.

Thanks for the hard work guys. :-)

Do want.

Just pre-ordered mine. As a bonus it can also be used as a FPGA dev board.

Poor video, certainly doesnt leave me begging for one, but its a nice product at a nice price. The sales video should have shown some usage, not how to install it, if anyone has trouble installing it, they probably shouldnt be buying one.

I like the idea of the JRE frontend but would certainly need to see it in action before throwing down the readies.

@janin
The thing that is wrong with a Java client is that it requires a JRE. The compiled Java for Windows is a nice touch though.

The answer to your next question ought be obvious.

And finally, I think diverging from Java would be a vast improvement for the client, but these are just my opinions.

Bought an Saleae Logic a few months back. It’s nice and everything but the client for Linux is in beta and is unfinished.

This is cheap and more importantly for me it’s 5v tolerant.

I dunno, its cheap but how much are the probes going to cost? that is going to be at least half the cost of the board

no mounting holes, ok yea it looks slick but I have a small cluttered desk, want me to buy 45$ worth of stuff to accidentally blob some solder or short it out, cant add some holes in the corners so we can mount it in a box to protect it

and then there is this on the website

“This open source hardware and software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you can’t accept this risk, please do not buy this hardware.”

for a particular purpose? its a darn LA how many purposes does it have

I think I will pass on this one for now until we can get some real …

a) cost with probes
b) way to protect it
c) know its going to do what is advertised

what about the clips smartass, they cost 16 bucks for a pack of 10 at reputable shops

@jackgassett Just watched the screencast, very impressive. I have just ordered a card, looking forward to trying it out.

These analyzers that use only the FPGA’s internal memory are just too limited in their sample depth to be really useful (eg. Rocky Logic and Bugblat have ones that are very similar featurewise). Would it make the design too complex or too expensive to add even a few megabytes of external RAM?

I have a comparison chart of various PC-based logic analyzers under $500. This is obviously the cheapest one, and the specs are pretty decent too. Only time will tell if there are any bugs that crop up due to the DIY nature of the project.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rmNr4Eeren8jBG7MXfHYxsQ&output=html

@davr

Nice speadsheet. I’ve been contemplating buying a zeroplus for a while.

“Re: Mounting…. buy a case, buy some self adhesive PCB mounting pillars, glue then on. Sorted.”

heh maybe Ill just hot glue it in a tin, still seems like 4 holes isnt that much to be asking for, considering Im going to have to make my own box and probes as it is

anyway I am about to send a polite email to them asking about what I brought up earlier, see what they say

@Rizla++
“And, I also don’t see the reason why Java should be slower…”

It’s a virtual machine. A single “Java bytecode instruction” (if you can even call them that) equates to numerous machine code instructions. Don’t bring up the fact that there are hardware accelerated JREs, because no one has one (as they’re virtually pointless).

I’d love to see your stats on Java being faster than C/C++. Care to provide some examples? There are plenty of modern comparisons showing C/C++ being faster, not to mention all large data crunching apps being written in C. Surely people willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computers wouldn’t hamper their efforts by using C over Java because of ‘old benchmarks’.

That link mentions bounds checking in C as a performance hit. Bounds checking. In C. …

No, you read that passage wrong. read it again.
Anyway, this is not the place for a lengthy debate on the relative performance of programming language. One certain thing is that performance is not an issue for a software like SUMP that is essentially a GUI.

@janin
Indeed you are correct. I just refuse to install a JRE on any of my machines; I’ll save Java for enterprise work.

@Tony
The project pages and discussions notion toward a future revision that will include DRAM, lots of it. Plus, with proper software and firmware, it ought to be possible to dump the SRAM on the fly, using it as a FIFO buffer of sorts, enabling unlimited sampling.

Its a shame that most of you don’t realize that this is also viable Xilinx Spartan 3 dev board with several pins routed to headers… From what I can tell that gives you atleast 48 GPIOs with usb/jtag interface to the host pc. I’m currently working with 8051F34x usb micros, propeller chip, and pic micros. This looks like a great addition to my toolkit and a good starting point for fpga dev.

@ReKlipz, @janin, @Spazed
Ok, this is the benchmark that supports my experience with voice recognition. :P
http://www.sunlabs.com/techrep/2002/abstract-114.html
I also agree that this is not the place to start a conversation about Java performance, we’re only talking about a GUI here! Which, for God’s sake, is impossible to actually be slow on modern hardware!

I still want that oscilloscope addon, though… :(

@rizla++, read the whole document. They said they could put the improvements from the java client into the C version, and it’d likely match the speed. They also changed the algorithms used.

What they’re saying is choosen very carefully, in that the work/cost/performance ratio of java to C is the benchmark, not the speed of C, but rather the lesser peforming algorithms and code of flite.

@GrizzlyAdam’s i think jacks butterfly is probably a better bet for a fpga dev board.

Nice tool, but the Java front end is a no-no for me.
Anyway as this isn’t a place for programming languages flame wars, here’s the short answer for those willing to write graphical interfaces for hardware but still afraid of C++: please consider Lazarus.

Lazarus is the open source multi platform clone of the glorious Delphi, the best interface builder ever created coupled with one of the most powerful object libraries and a blazingly fast compiler.
Now the Lazarus clone produces 100% native code
(no VM’s, JIT and other bull) on a plethora of systems/OS’s going from your Windows desktop to the Nokia N900 phone, OSX included.

http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

The right way of going multiplartform is to have multiplatform (cross) compilers, not using a virtual machine that eats cpu cycles for no reason.
Lazarus (as other well thought develpment systems) does just that.

Thanx asdf !

Maybe I’m just too impatient or too much of a mere mortal who can’t figure out the intricacies of the install process, but I can’t get this thing running..

Where the heck is the transcript that goes along with the Youtube video? I just want to get this set up in a reasonable amount of time so I can get to analyzing my logic. I got a thesis to write and not a whole lot of time to futz with Lunix…..

Man, sucks to be under 18. What if you’re parents aren’t home to give you assistance with the wooden stake attachement and a dracula shows up during gameplay? That’s tough.